


Yes, my weird depressed half-tree uncle

by Aesoleucian



Category: Boruto: Naruto Next Generations, Naruto
Genre: Gen, obito lives au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 01:06:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14557515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aesoleucian/pseuds/Aesoleucian
Summary: Sarada is such a lonely kid, and Sakura has such a dissociative disorder. Where are Sakura's parents? Where is the support? Being a single mom is hard and therefore I crafted this AU where Obito survives the war and retires to help restore his clan which he helped murder.





	Yes, my weird depressed half-tree uncle

Most of the other kids Sarada knows have a mom and a dad. Sarada has a mom and an uncle.

When she asks her mom why she doesn’t have a dad, her mom says, “He’s on a very important mission to protect the village,” and then she says, “I can’t tell you what it is.”

When she asks her uncle, her uncle says, “He’s a shitty brat and he can’t face the idea of having a family, so he ran away. If he ever comes back you shouldn’t give him the time of day. Better yet, give him a good kick in the nuts.”

And her uncle teaches her to kick a man in the nuts, which she is supposed to do if any man is bothering her. “What if a woman is bothering me?” she asks.

“Try it anyway, you never know. And it still hurts like a bitch if you don’t have nuts.” Then he adds, “Shit, don’t repeat any of the words I say or your mom will punch me in half. It won’t kill me, but honestly? That just makes it worse.”

Her uncle is really cool, even if he uses a lot of bad words. He never breaks any other rules, and unlike some of her stupid friends he never makes fun of her for wanting to follow rules. And when she turns eight he takes her out to the pond in the park to teach her how to breathe fire.

“You’re the heir to the Uchiha clan,” he says. “And the only kid we’ve got right now. So it’s important for you to know our signature technique. It’s called the Grand Fireball, and it looks like this.” His chest puffs out, and his cheeks puff out, and the air in front of him turns to solid fire. Sarada can’t look away, and doesn’t want to. A technique from her clan! She knows a little Uchiha-style taijutsu and some shuriken tricks her mom and uncle have taught her, but this is way better.

She spends two hours blowing out nothing but air, and when she starts to get really frustrated he puts a hand on her head. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “You don’t get everything on the first try, or even the hundredth try. It’s better to be a genius of hard work. When I was your age I couldn’t do jack shit and my fireball sucked.”

“Are you a genius of hard work, Uncle?”

“Ehh, not really. I mostly got good because I didn’t have any other choice. I would have died if I didn’t. Now I’m very lazy, and I’m fine with that. I’m not really into fighting these days. Kakashi can’t even get on my case about it, since he’s retired too. Man, I should retire to a hot spring.”

“Are you going to leave?” Sarada asks, grabbing the hem of his shirt. “Like Dad did?”

He scoffs. “Don’t even compare me to that deadbeat. I’m way more reliable. If I ever go to a hot spring you can come with me and we can tease Bakashi together.”

“Promise?”

“I swear it.”

 

Sometimes her uncle can’t train with her, though. Sometimes he locks himself in his room and when she knocks he says “Go away!” in the scariest voice ever. A long time ago, the first time this happened, she cried for a really long time and eventually he came out and started crying too and told her to get her mom if it happened again. So now she runs to find her mom and follows a little ways behind her while she unlocks the door and uses her own scary voice to say, “Obito-san! Where do you think you are?”

Sarada presses herself up by the door, just out of sight, and listens to them talking in low voices. “I _know_ where I am, Sakura,” says her uncle. He sounds frustrated, or maybe afraid. “It doesn’t help. I want to rip off my fucking arm, but it’s not just my arm, is it, you know better than anyone I don’t even have a _heart_ any more, just that hole where Kakashi put his fucking fist through my chest except it’s not there any more because I can’t even keep a _hole_ in my chest it keeps healing, no matter what I do it keeps healing and I want it to _stop_. It wouldn’t be so bad except the reason is that he—he…”

“How can I help you?” asks her mom. “Do you want me to put you to sleep?”

“Just sit here with me for a while,” he says in a tiny voice. “It helps… it helps to be able to touch someone with my real hand. But I don’t want Sarada to see me like this. Do you ever feel like you have to be too strong for her? So strong that you become brittle and start to crack—”

“Shhh. I know, Obito-san. Raising a child is difficult.  That’s why I’m so glad to have you with me. I don’t think I could do it on my own. Being strong is hard, but she’s worth it. Our little girl.”

“She is,” says her uncle quietly. That’s when Sarada sneaks away, feeling kind of proud and kind of ashamed. She makes everything harder just by existing, but she’s also worth it.

She’ll be even more worth it if she starts making things easier instead.

 

She gets her uncle to teach her to cook so she can help with dinner when her mom is busy at the hospital and make him breakfast when he’s sleeping in. She practices on her own for hours and hours and hours until her fireball is perfect and her knife throwing is perfect. She practices until she gets giant blisters on her hands and they pop and start bleeding all over the shuriken she’s holding, and she’s just kind of surprised because she stopped feeling the pain a while ago. But she didn’t bring any bandages with her, so she goes home to find some.

“Uncle! Where’s the first aid kit!” she calls.

“Bathroom sink. Did you hurt yourself training?” He pokes his head out of the living room where he always reads, and then he kind of freezes. “Sarada, your hands. You’re covered in blood, you’re _covered_ in blood, you’re covered in blood, you’re covered in _blood_ —”

“It’s just blisters, Uncle! I’m fine! They barely hurt!”

But he sinks down onto the floor and clutches her hands and bows his head over them like she’s already dead and he’s mourning her. She tries to tug them back, uneasy. “I’m fine, Uncle.”

“Don’t train too hard,” he murmurs. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

“I won’t, Uncle.”

She learns to never let her uncle see her bleeding. He’s kind of embarrassing, it’s not really a big deal. As she gets older she realizes her mom is maybe not all there either. Sometimes instead of answering a question she’ll stare straight ahead through Sarada. When she gets upset—if Sarada breaks something important or says something she really shouldn’t—her eyes will get far away and scary and she’ll break whatever she’s holding and her face will just be totally blank.

Usually when that happens Sarada goes to Hinata-san or Ino-san’s house. Boruto says his mom is scary when she’s mad at him, but in the normal way (Sarada doesn’t know what the normal way for a mom to be scary is). Inojin says his mom does the same thing as Sarada’s mom but his dad explained to him that she has PTSD and it’s pretty normal for her to check out of reality sometimes. His mom has lots of psychology books (“She used to interrogate people!” Inojin says proudly), so he helps Sarada look up PTSD and shows her how the book says it happens to people if they go through something horrible like a war.

“Do you think my uncle has it too?” Sarada asks.

“That weird guy with one eye who always wears exactly one glove? I don’t really know him. He never visits, unlike Sakura-san. But if he was in the war he probably does.”

“He’s really old,” says Sarada. “I think he was in more than one war.”

“Then he has twice the amount of PTSD,” says Inojin. “I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.”

“Does your dad have it too? He was in the war, right?”

“Hmm. He didn’t say. He’s kind of like that all the time, so I think it might just be his personality. Do you want lunch?”

 

It’s really not all bad, though. Her mom and her uncle love her a lot, and they’re really proud of her. They don’t really get messed up from PTSD _that_ often, and she starts to figure out how to help when they do. Sometimes she wonders if her dad has PTSD and that’s why he had to leave. She kind of believes her mom that he has a mission, and kind of believes her uncle that he’s a coward, and maybe it’s both things. Raising a child is very difficult, so she can hardly blame him if he didn’t want to do it. Sometimes she thinks he didn’t really exist, though, and the man in the photo is someone pretending to be him. Maybe her uncle is her real dad, since he’s the only other Uchiha she’s ever seen. She doesn’t ask him, because he’ll be embarrassed or he’ll be embarrassing, but it’s her most likely theory.

One day he goes away on a trip—a mission, she thinks—and she’s anxious for three whole days that he’s not going to come back, just like her dad if he’s real. But he does come back, and he has another lady with him, a beautiful lady with red hair and Sarada’s same glasses.

“Yo, Sakura,” says the lady when they walk in at dinner. “Long time, no see. Oh, the kid is working out well.”

Sarada looks at the lady nervously. She hasn’t really been addressed, but she knows it’s rude to talk about someone like they’re not there.

“It’s good to see you again, Karin,” says Sakura, and she really does look relieved. And then she starts talking. No-one ever told Sarada what’s going on, so most of what they say goes over her head. She leans into her uncle’s side and just stares at the wall, kind of annoyed that they’re leaving her out but not willing to ask what they’re talking about. Her uncle puts an arm around her shoulder but he keeps talking about complicated medical stuff. At points it almost sounds like they’re haggling, like Sarada has to do at the market when the price of something goes up for no reason. At the end of dinner, long after the food gets cold, her uncle says,

“Then it’s settled?”

“Tch,” says Karin-san. “Yeah, fine. I hope you don’t expect me to be a mom or something.”

“It would be nice if you’d visit sometimes,” says Sarada’s mom, smiling at Karin-san.

“Tch. Yeah, all right. Stop making those goopy eyes at me, you weirdo. See you in nine months.”

“Absolutely not,” says Sarada’s mom. “I’m going to come and do one checkup a month. I _am_ a doctor, you know.”

“Blah, blah, best medic-nin in the entire world. Yeah, I know. I won’t _stop_ you. See you, Sakura. See you, Uchiha.”

She gets up and leaves, and she’s almost out the door by the time Sarada’s mom calls, “We’re all Uchiha here, Karin!”

“Can I be excused,” Sarada mumbles.

“Sorry we left you out ,” says her uncle. “Karin is really impatient and she hates to explain anything. You’re going to have a cousin.” Sarada stares at him. “Well, _I_ think it’s a good thing.”

“Are you and Karin-san married??” asks Sarada.

Her uncle and her mom frown at each other. “Ummm,” says her uncle.

“Surrogacy is the practice of carrying a baby for someone else, as part of a business contract,” says her mom.

“So you… hired Karin-san to have your baby?”

“Ye…es,” says Sarada’s mom. She’s chewing on her fingernail now, giving her uncle some kind of look Sarada can’t read. “Karin helped me have you, so she’s a trusted friend. We’re hoping she’ll become part of the family, though.”

“Get it,” says her uncle under his breath, and her mom smacks him, and he laughs.

 

Sarada is almost ready to enter the Academy by the time the baby comes. Karin-san comes back too with Sarada’s mom, leaning on her arm and holding the baby in a sling.

“Uncle!” Sarada calls. “They’re back!”

Her uncle bangs out of another room as her mom and Karin-san collapse onto the couch. “You made it! He’s so _small_. So, what’s his name going to be?”

Karin-san waves her hand. “He’s _your_ kid, you name him.”

Her uncle can’t seem to restrain a grin as he looks up at the ceiling. “I never thought I’d get to name a baby. Hey, Sarada, what do you think? Should we name him after a relative? It would be kind of nice as a gesture, don’t you think, the continuation of the clan? I think Setsuna would be a cute name, after my great uncle, but my grandma would kill me from beyond the grave if I didn’t name him after my dad…”

He’s never talked about the rest of his family at all, so Sarada says, “Can you tell me about your dad?”

“Ah, not really. I can get you some water, Karin.”

“Tea or fucking die,” says Karin-san.

“Yes, ma’am. He died when before I was born, so I was raised by my grandmother. All I really know about him is that his name was Naoto and he was a war hero. He died to save three whole squads from Iwa-nin.”

“I think Naoto is a good name,” says Sarada, who has followed him into the kitchen. “Naoto-chan. It’s cute.”

“Uchiha Naoto!” her uncle proclaims, loud enough so the whole house can hear it.

“Shut up!” yells Karin-san from the living room.

Naoto-chan wakes up and starts crying in a surprisingly tiny voice. “Fuck you, Uchiha,” says Karin-san, muffled by the wall of the kitchen. “Look, do you want to eat? Is that what you want, you little shithead?”

“Don’t insult the baby,” says Sarada’s mom, sounding amused.

They come back in with tea a little while later and Naoto-chan is latched onto Karin-san under her shirt. Karin-san is leaning against Sarada’s mom, looking tired, but she sits up to take the tea her uncle offers, and even mutters, “Thanks.”

 

Karin-san keeps saying she’ll be gone in a couple days, but she also keeps saying she has to make sure Naoto-chan doesn’t die, because that would be a lot of wasted effort and it would piss her the hell off. Sarada enters the Academy and Karin-san is still there, arguing with her mom about nutrition and vaccinations. Sometimes Karin-san is the only one who is home because Sarada’s uncle likes to go to the forest when he’s stressed out, so she’s the one Sarada tells about the strange-looking transfer student from Oto.

“Oh, Mitsuki?” she says. “Naoto, do _not_ fucking put that in your mouth.”

“You shouldn’t swear around h—how do you know his name?”

“He’s my boss’s kid. Cute but dumb, Juugo and Suigetsu can’t get enough of him. Kind of spoiled. I will buy a fucking muzzle, you demon.”

Sarada files that away. Maybe she’ll tell Boruto a secret about his new friend, if she’s feeling generous. Mitsuki sticks to him like glue, and Sarada isn’t the only one who thinks it’s kind of weird.

Karin-san still isn’t gone six months later when Sumire almost blows up the village, and at that point Sarada is pretty confident that she’s not going to leave. She seems to have a fun time teasing Uncle Obito, and she actually _likes_ Sarada’s mom. Once when Sarada and her uncle get home late from training there’s a thump and then Karin-san and her mom are on opposite ends of the kitchen, slightly ruffled and not looking at each other. Sarada has seen Iwabe and Denki get teased for this enough that she knows exactly what is up, so she just ignores it and goes to check on Naoto-chan. Her mom will just get embarrassed and deny it if she says anything, and everything will be awkward.

From the other room she hears her uncle saying, “Look, _one_ of you has to give me a high five.”

“I guess Karin-san was my dad all along,” she says to Naoto-chan, and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Pissed at Sasuke because he's doing a shitty job of restoring his clan, as was his stated goal. Couldn't you AT LEAST donate a couple more sperm to Orochimaru's lab to make more kids. Come on. Come on.
> 
> Also just because Sakura and Karin got together, don't think this means Sakura and Ino have not been friends with benefits for 16 years, because they very much have.


End file.
